Who Designed That Packaging

We’ve all seen it on the store shelves. That product where you pick one up, look at it and when you set it back on the fixture it falls over because it is top heavy and a half dozen others fall over. Or you pick it up and the bottom opens spilling the entire contents out on the floor, usually a powder of some type while the twenty other shoppers in the aisle all turn and look at you. Then there are the ones where you have to pry it off the peg hook because the hole is too small and you end up setting anywhere since there is no way you will ever be able to put it back where it came from.

So, like me, you wonder “Who Designed That Packaging?”

Shortly before my company ceased operations we received a work order to reset 16-20 feet of air freshener products in a national big box retail account. The order came down on Tuesday and we had the following three weeks to complete them with billing for up to 3-4 people per store per set. The project included not just our client’s product but all air freshener products in a set group of stores. I had resets available in ten of the 30 stores in my territory and it was a great opportunity to provide my teams with work and to provide billable income to my company.

The next day I was in one of the 10 stores assigned to me and after speaking with the store management I discovered that they needed to have the project completed by the end of the following week! My fire drill began. After checking work availability with my part-time employees I then contacted all of the stores involved with the reset in my territory and was able to schedule 9 of the 10 resets for the following week. Kaching! Billing for my territory!

We arrived Monday morning at 7:00 AM to start our first reset. Since we were going to perform the reset the department manager decided to take the day off and we had never handled this product category before. We persevered.

Now this large big box retailer uses “pushers” to bring the product forward on the shelf. You know, those spring loaded devices that once you remove something from the shelf it is next to impossible to put it back. They were labor intensive to reset and it wasn’t long before we all reeked of air fresheners.

One manufacturer had a particular group of products that were packaged in that heavy plastic that you need a pair of tin snips to open. It conformed to the shape of the product, their brand was prominent on the package and it basically looked great. There was only one major problem. Once you tried to merchandise it on a shelf with pushers it would not stay in place. It would immediately pop out onto the floor or fall behind the pushers where you could no longer see it and the allocated space was on the top shelf! It had been designed to hang on peg hooks and not sit on a shelf!

I was back in this store the following week and ventured down the air freshener aisle and sure enough all of this product was either behind the pushers or stuffed elsewhere on the fixtures.

Now I do not have years of experience as a product category manager in consumer goods but I do have a basic understanding of how a product is brought to market. Market research, graphic design, manufacturing and shipping costs and being able to be cost competitive with the item are a few of the aspects the teams that major manufacturers bring together consider when bringing items to market. How could they have missed that final step? How could they have overlooked how that packaging would function on the shelves of the largest retailer in the world?

So I ask “Who designed that packaging?” Or better yet, maybe I should have!

So that’s my story for today.
Share your stories with me. I would like to hear your tales of the worst packaging you’ve encountered.
Life is Good!